S4A is back at it again! The 2013 My Color Green workshop prompted the movement to answer the question, "What's Your Color Green?" We recognize that the Green movement has been shaped into an ideal that many/most do not fit into. What's Your Color Green encourages us all to CELEBRATE where we are in the fight towards sustainability. So we dare you, to record your own short video and tell us what your color green is! Let's spark a movement! Ready, Set, Go!

Sustainability for All: my color green

2013 Key note speakers

Nikki Henderson Executive Director of People's Grocery

Nikki began her work in social justice through the foster care system in Southern California, having been raised with seven older foster brothers. Through mentoring, tutoring, and directing Foster Youth Empowerment Workshops, she developed her passion for youth leadership development among communities of color. She later shifted into sustainability, developing course curriculum for the University of California system and advocating across the state for environmental justice and political ecology.

She has worked closely with Van Jones and Phaedra Ellis Lamkins at Green for All, fighting for a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. She was also a part of Slow Food USA in Brooklyn, NY where President Josh Viertel came to regard her as an “extraordinary leader with a vision for how food and urban farming can be tools of empowerment”. In 2009, Nikki co-founded Live Real, a national collaborative of food movement organizations committed to strengthening and expanding the youth food movement in the United States. In 2010, Nikki was featured in ELLE magazine as one of the five Gold Awardees. She has a Master’s degree in African American Studies from UCLA, and is originally from Los Angeles, CA.

Alma M.O. Trinidad, PhD, MSW

Alma is an Assistant Professor in the School ofSocial Work, Child and Family Studies at Portland State University. She is a macro social worker by training, and brings an array of work and scholarship in community organizing, health and mental health promotion, and education among diverse communities. Alma's research, scholarly activism, and teaching focus on community youth participation, critical Indigenous pedagogy of place, and community epistemology as venues for empowerment, sociopolitical development, collective consciousness, and promotion of health and wellness.

Alma's presentation will be about Allyship. Becoming an ally in the sustainability movement is challenging. It begins with restoring trust among people, especially when the system limits it. This interactive presentation introduces a framework of allyship for social change. It highlights findings of studies on how allyship have been formed in communities of color. This interactive presentation then provides sample activities that could be used for groups or communities to begin talking about what it means to be an ally across differences in their respective places. Participants will engage with1-2 of these activities hoping to be inspired and grounded in the work of being an authentic ally and of becoming a social change agent.

Pedro Ferbel-Azcarate

Pedro is a full time, core faculty member at Portland State University and teaches 1/3 time in Black Studies and 2/3 time in University Studies, teaching Senior Capstones on topics of social sustainability and civic engagement.Pedro earned his Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Archaeological Studies from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1995; a Masters in Anthropology/ Archaeology from the University of South Carolina, Columbia in 1991; and a BA in Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1988. Pedro is an interdisciplinary archaeologist, an independent scholar affiliated with the Archivo Historico de Santiago, Dominican Republic, and works on archaeological and anthropological studies of the Caribbean region, with a focus on the Dominican Republic and Cuba. Pedro's research uncovers the politics of the nation state in controlling the identity of colonized and globalized people, and the struggle of communities against dominant paradigms including colonialism, racism, classism, sexism and globalization.

A dynamic speaker, Pedro has presented talks and workshops in the USA and abroad, related to his study of indigenous and transculturated (Afro-Mestizo Creole) medicine, architecture, foodways, spiritual practices, folklore, agriculture, casabe making, and tobacco use in rural and urban Dominican Republic, especially the Cibao region, and in Eastern Cuba. He is known for his support of, and as a collaborator with, contemporary Taino communities asserting their cultural and biological survival. As an archaeologist, he has experience with pre-Columbian and Contact period sites with petroglyphs, plazas, and social/spatial organization. As an academic and community activist in Portland, Oregon, Pedro has coordinated and led workshops on themes of race and identity, environmental racism, poverty and food access, and health and nutrition in communities of color. Pedro has also pioneered urban permaculture projects in Portland, Oregon and has led workshops on building with earth masonry (cob), community design, and urban agriculture (see www.cityrepair.org (http://www.cityrepair.org) ).

2013 Break out session presenters

Cassie Cohen from Ground Work Portland Who is impacted by the burdens of our contaminated river and land?
What can we do to address those burdens? This session will
create dialogue about actions people can take to address
our contaminated river and land. This session will also demystify
the concepts of environmental justice, brown fields and Superfund.

Emanuel
Price from SCAFE SCAFE addresses issues of education, employment, empowerment, and economic sustainability through accountability and community support programs. We will speak on reducing recidivism, and bridging the gap between prison & successfully transitioning into society. Healthcare, employment, education, re-entry, community support and economic sustainability.

Princess Reese Princess will lead a session titled : Look
At That: Sustainable CampusThis session will cover different ways that help a campus Sustainability Movement accomplish several things: 1. Get the word out 2. Been Seen 3. Draw others in

Patrick LairsonPatrick will lead a session titled Queeries . The purpose of Queeries is to create a Safe Space for people of all opinions and backgrounds to share conversation, questions, stories, and feelings with members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and ally community.

Sarah
Taylor Sarah's session Teaching Social Sustainability will explore practical ways to bring social sustainability in the daily rhythm of a school day. We will look at key things teachers can do for free and how they are reflected both in nature and traditional cultures. Students from Sunnyside Environmental School will be present to share how these things are done in their classroom. We will present a new free online book that everyone can have access to.

Kailash EcovillageKailash Ecovillage is a permaculture based intentional community. We are presenting a question and answer session where participants can ask questions about living in a sustainable ecovillage. There are some very lovely things about living in a community where all 50 residents know everyone who lives there. We have many sustainable projects on the property including rainwater catchment, humanure, food forest, outdoor living areas, a passive solar house etc.

Ellen WyomingEllen will lead a session titled : Env & Soc Jus: Moving Towards Dialogue & Finding Common Ground. The sustainability movement has often been branded, labeled, or identified as a movement
for people with the privilege
of participation. This often means that
"sustainability" in the terms that it is most frequently discussed, is targeted
towards an upper-middle class consumer who can afford to "buy" and
"use" everything so that they need to think about "using less". This
framework dismisses many people who may in fact already be participating deeply in the
sustainability movement and who would benefit from being a contributor and
participant in the conversation. Today, many well-meaning people may find
themselves in diverse positions and while the assumption is that they are working
towards a common cause, they may actually be injuring the opportunity for a
wider dialogue about what sustainability means, why it's important, and
how people from all walks of life can, or indeed, already are, deeply
participate. We'll explore safe ways for dialogue and
thought leadership around this to bring to light the thoughtfulness and care
that must be exercised when working towards a "common good" to
ensure that the goods are indeed, received commonly

Kenya
WilliamsKenya will lead a session titled: Community and Sound: Soundscape Awareness 101 Soundscape planning and design maximizes public awareness and access to a healthy
soundscape. Like clean water and clean air, a healthy soundscape is a resource
to which the public is entitled; without this resource we cannot
build or maintain healthy communities. This presentation will provide an
introduction to soundscape awareness and the sonic environment

Kirk Rea, Oran Stainbrook, and Ridhi D'Cruz The team will lead a session about Placemaking at PSU by the PSU Village Building Convergence Team.
How is Placemaking defined? Is it fun? Is it difficult? Is it dirty? We will use our time together to discuss the
common outdoor spaces that we inhabit and take care of. Through showcasing
the work of PSU communities, we hope to catalyze our collective creative juices
through group envisioning of
spaces on campus that will act as sites for
the 2013 Village Building Convergence.

Michelle
KhalifeMichelle will be presenting the Johari window. This is a tool used for for the building of
self-awareness. She will ask participants to draw a window with four
compartments, with each compartment representing a different side of themselves.
Participants can draw picture
or use words to represent
who they are and what they stand for

Monica
Cuneo & Alex
Novie Food Justice Dialogues: Who is at the Table? While Portland, Oregon’s sustainable food movement wins accolades for explicitly
situating itself in opposition to the industrialized global agri-food system, it often
fails to address race- and class-based oppression that is reproduced
within the alternative agri-food movement. This paper focuses on a
participatory action research project involving a series of community workshops that
address issues of race and class in Portland’s sustainable food movement,
with the intention of facilitating dialogue between food systems and
social justice stakeholder groups. Following sessions on anti-oppression,
participants will co-create desired outcomes and visions for the project’s
‘afterlife.’ We hypothesize that by bringing diverse groups to
the same table, they may find new ways to communicate, learn, identify
common goals and best practices, and potentially network, collaborate and/or
co-produce transformative anti-oppression strategies to integrate into
the alternative agri-food system movement. This paper examines the
workshop series itself, and the efficacy of this model in forging
relationships among varied stakeholders as well as opportunities and challenges in
focusing an anti-oppression lens on the mainstream narratives of food justice

Princess Reese Princess will present: Dealing with Cognitive Dissonance in Sustainability The presentation will handle explaining cognitive dissonance, and how to effectively handle the experience in the Sustainability World.

2013 Table presenters More coming soon

Hosted By the Sustainability Leaders Network“Educating, networking, and nurturing leaders as change agents now for a sustainable future”

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